The Lost Continent of Mu

I know its wrong, but I love the idea of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Its this feature of the North Pacific Gyre where plastic waste and debris accumulates. All the plastic waste ejected into the ocean from Asia and North America, floating about on the ocean's currents, it all ends up bobbing about in the neuston of the gyre.

Like some great automatic refuse collection system, but without the garbage trucks. Sure its not free refuse collection cos the plastic ends up killing millions of sea creatures, but in terms of human involvement, its a passive system.

Apparently the area which the plastic waste collects in is about the size of Texas, its essentially a lost continent. But its not some solid piece of land, no one can walk on it, but its big and its got mass. Plastic barrels, cargo containers, plastic ducks, monofilament fishing line, all bobbing about.

And its there for the harvesting.

I've got this idea, well, a great stream of ideas.

Did you ever read that Treehugger article about some process to turn plastic into oil? Could they no just put one of those plants on an 'oil rig' in the middle of the gyre and let the plastic come to it. The operation could be self-sustaining, and just churn out crude oil.

It might take a load of investment to get off the ground, but hey, whilst we're on the way, lets have some fun and play some games.

Remember that Onion story about dolphins developing opposable thumbs?

What we need for the North Pacific Gyre is some thumb dolphins. No no, not live mammal dolphins, but something cooked up before the folk who make things on Robot Wars. I want a radio-controlled boaty thing with a robot arm or two on it, with opposable thumbs.

Not just radio controlled, but ethernet controlled. Controlled remotely over the world wide web, so some geek in his bedroom thousands of miles away can be controlling a wee thumb dolphin as it cruises about the gyre looking for large lumps of plastic, then dragging them to other large bits of plastic and sticking them together.

The world already has thousands of folk playing World of Warcraft, running about fantasy worlds, solving quests. This would be the same thing, but not virtual, just remotely controlled.

Now the punter in his bedroom has got to be able to see what he's doing, so when he drives his boat abou the can see where he's going and when he manipulates his robot arms he can see what he's grabbing hold of. So your thumb dolphin needs two webcam eyes, for stereoscopic vision, and also cos we're playing water world of warcraft, the player could do with a third person camera angle, so how about a camera on a stick coming out of the back of the thumb dolphin. Kind of like Mark Owens' Avatar Machine. Actually, a few scouter boats with their own cameras on really long sticks would be neat, to give a wider view of the area your thumb dolphins are working on, that would be cool, and if they also house solar panels and recharging docks for the dolphins.

At fist I was thinking that these thumb dolphins could tie the plastic bits that the find together using nylon string, but thats gonna be really difficult with their little robot hands. So, maybe using epoxy glue that might be easier, or if its sunny, a big old magnifying glass to weld bits of plastic together.

Actually, sack that, why not all three, give the gaming punters a choice. Have different professions of thumb dolphins, some have glue, some have magnifying glasses, some have better developed robot arms for tying knots.

How about stepping up a level and have different races of thumb dolphins, with more specialisation.

• Tugs - clunky tug boats for locating and pulling together large bits of plastic.
• Winders - seek out the monofilament wire and wind it onto reels to be used by...
• Tyers - who tie things together
• Scrabblers - who climb over larger pieces
• Lobbers - who chuck smaller bits of plastic onto larger bits.

What we're trying to do here is build up a larger and larger single mass of plastic, a floating island, which has just enough structural integrity to hold its own bobbing about in the middle of the ocean. We want one of these, built by remote control.

Sure there needs to be some kind of central plan rather than just a load of WoW players dicking around. So you have Quests for the players things like:-

• "accumulate 5Kg of mass"
• "secure the east side of the island"
• "find 100m of filament!
• "retrieve player 23 who's run out of power"

So at the moment its all wave and solar powered, maybe the first boat on site will have to be a power station.

I ought to be thinking about structural integrity, cos those waves and storms are going to tear this thing apart. Its a big hole in my thinking, I like to think that the landmass becomes so big that no storm will destroy it. Sure it bobs up and down with waves, and sure a storm will rip bits off it, but the army of thumb dolphins can stitch it back together. And if a hurricane tears the island in half, they can stitch that back together too.

I know you're just wondering about the effect of all this on the local wild life, but don't worry, the North Pacific Gyre is mostly a dead zone, cos of all that plastic. This also makes it an excellent candidate for ocean seeding. This is the process whereby iron filings or iron sulphate are dumped in an ocean, encouraging algae blooms, which then draw CO2 out of the atmosphere, then die off and sink in the ocean. It either sinks to the bottom where the CO2 is sequestrated or is eaten up by fishies encourage more fish-life in the area.

Hmph, these fish are going to be inedible cos of the plastic and will lead relatively short and unsatisfying lives.

Ooh, you know that thing with mercury poisoning, where it accumulates in plants or animals until it kills the animal, then some other larger animal like a human or a panda eats the dead animal and absorbs the mercury and then accumulates it until they too die. But ultimately you get a corpse with a concentration of mercury in it, rather than diluted mercury spread all over the shop. Does the same thing happen with plastic and aquatic life? Our thumb dolphins collect all the large bits of plastic and we leave it to the food chain, fish and birds to accumulate all the smaller bits until they die and we can sling them on our new plasticy compost heaps.

So five years down the line, after our army if internet WoW thumb dolphin pilots have created our lost continent of plastic, we're going to want folk to live there, subsidence crofters perhaps. But more likely the sort of human life you get developing on third world rubbish tips, forraging for stuff to sell. Its not much of a life, but its what we can expect at first, loading up ships with whatever they've salvaged from the gyre, living under the shadow of our plastic to crude oil rig that's arrived.

Ooh, back to that ocean seeding operation, remember before the Beijing Olympics there was all that problem with algae clogging up the Qingdao sailing area, can we encourage that to happen, and then use all the algae as fertilizer and compost for farm land on our island. Sure it'll stink for a a few years, but it seems like a quick way to build up organic landmass, so we can start farming operations.

I see grain being grown, and potatoes, some kind of genetically engineered salt-resistant variety, and chickens running about pecking at it.

How much area of solar panels do we need to run a desalination plant? We're going to have acres of inorganic land where no plants will grow for a while and it'll be perfect for solar panels I reckon.

I can has world donimation?

Ill Theatre strip from several months back


Today's XKCD


What do I win? C'm'ere girl, we got drinkin' and DVDin' to do.

Mouth

Still in agony, woke up twice last night in pain after turning on the wrong side.

Work is okay, but i did get overcome with emotion and had to go and cry in a quiet corner after we managed to get some stuff done on time.

Over on Facebook, Rosie reckons if I change my profile picture I won't remain single for much longer, suggesting first I use a photo of me and my niece, and then an arty black and white one of me playing guitar.

Four hours later and it hasn't had any effect on my singularity, but I do become sad reading facebook.

Over on the nuddy chicks site, after the phenomenal success of my first venture, I'm looking around at work to find a post-it pad to do a quick "YOUR ADVERT HERE $2/week" image of the side column. If you know of anyone who'd want to advertise their wares to around 14,000 people all over the world every week, email me.

Went out last night to meet Rowan and Mark and go on the London Eye, the damned thing closes at 8pm at this time of year so we went to a pub, watched the football and I drank that Fruli's strawberry beer. Its like CAMRA alcopop.

Success and agony

eeep, With google adsense abandoning me when I was barely up to $60, they only pay out at $100 intervals, so I had to seek other sources of revenue. By selling ad space directly to the selling folk, I can make $1/week, or if I up my prices who knows. Got the first payment yesterday. Skipping round my room think who I could spend the naked chick millions on.

Injured cheek is getting annoying. Depending on which side I lie on when I'm in bed, woke up in howling agony several times. Face is now hideously disfigured and my speech has been affected, sounds like I'm trying to chaw a whole pack of gum when I talk.

Sleep also disrupted by early morning text messages, but hey ho, I guess it comes with the territory of being the sort of person folk call in times of need and loneliness.

Still craving company and afflicted by crippling loneliness. Possibly going on the London Eye this evening with Rowan Just Joan and boyf. Would prefer warm hug and someone to tell me that beans on toast ought not be the best meal of yer week.

Game raising

Do I raise my game?

On places like the nuddy chicks site, in addition to the handful of pics a day, I also post about politics and random ranting and gig reviews and music and stuff, just keep pushing and pushing. Getting more traffic from more different quarters rather than just the youporn and sex blogger sectors?

The shyness that dogs me in real life, I'd never quite noticed it online, but its there just the same. Whilst I can just about handle getting on stage, standing on a table, waving my arms about and talking any old shit to an audience of thousands, sharing my innermost privacies with half a million net surfers. I can't just chat to folk.

There's a threshold to cross, at NPL or HDIF or Spiral Scratch. I stand in the shadows or sit in a corner, gazing at my pint or stabbing at my phone, until at some point someone says hi, or sense takes over and I get up. This threshold, this threshold.

Its the same online in MSN, Twitter, Facebook et al. I bubble in the corner, distracting myself with the internet, creating and racing, until the threshold gets unbearable and I step over to speak to the folk who've popped up in the bottom right. Other people's comments and links become too ubiquitous and I feel left out to the point of fixing it. The tangible threshold.

IP addresses to, on the statcounter logs, the familiar ones from one day to the next, glancing over whilst I stare at my pint and stab fixedly at my keyboard.

Failed attempt at being.

Its mostly guilt that brings me to Barden's Boudoir tonight. Sure I could claim to be a big fan of Arthur and Martha, but that would be doing a great disservice to Sharon from The Gresham Flyers who spent the best part of an hour working on me last weekend.

Since I've known half the people in the room for half a decade, but save the merest glimmer of recognition from the girl on the door, it counts for nothing. What I get, I have to get myself, like my damned fool plan to have one of the most popular political blogs in the UK, on a whim, because I can.

My car's parked just down the way, this is my first time in Stoke Newington, well, the first conscious time. A mob of locals came yahooing down the street as I locked my car, I swear one was packing heat. I'm only quite sure I'm not some kind of split personality serial killer, avenging some half-imagined crimes of the past, but sometimes I wake up in strange placed covered in blood that isn't my own.

Arthur and Martha on stage, halfway through AutoVia, my favourite song of their's, alas it the final song of the set. 'Arthur' seemed to be rocking out a little more than usual.

Summer festival appearances should be good.

I don't know if I was actively trying, maybe it was just going through the motions, I stood at the front, as near to the speakers as possible without people thinking 'he's standing as close to the speakers as possible', but I didn't hear any of the second band, save the blistering shards of an epic guitar solo and people clapping. Instead, I was in another place.

It was like in geography class or some MRPII meeting, slipping out of consciousness. Faces of girls I'd loved and any tenuous connection they had with the band before me. Memories of seeing them there or photos of the scene, glimpses like from a passing car, from too far away or the wrong side of the room. The stabbing shards of seperation, of missing something very important, of helplessness, of fate and damned bad luck.

Even in my slipping out of lucidity, I knew something was wrong and sought to guide my stream elsewhere to Manchester and Bolton and married life, anything away from the hell I occupied.

But it didn't quite work, the stabbing shafts of reality and it all comes back to east London cutting through. The here and now, crushing on what once was, or what I remember of it.

Even the reaffirming terrible truth that what I remember isn't the same as what actually happened.

The memories are wrong, incorrect, I know that for certain. But they are still the memories in my head, crystal clear, as though it was yesterday, last week, last year or a decade ago. The memories, soured by the truth.

Where the hell are the toilets in here?

I think I saw Das Wanderlust at Indietracks, but I can't for the life of me remember what they sounded like, and it would be unfair to judge them on tonight's performance considering it was mostly "imagine that last song sounded great" on the grounds that the singing girl had lost her voice, and the one song where DJ Waz played the 7" and the mimed along.

There were people behind me who wouldn't stop talking.

If asked what did I think of the evening, in an imaginary conversation with some vague acquaintance who happened to ask, I think in order to improve my quality of life I should have gone to the My Sad Captains single launch instead. I can barely control what goes on in my head, providing rope to hang myself was never going to be good and a better tunes would have been nicer.

Maybe that's unfair.

I think I've made many bad life decisions. I can't quite pin-point any of them, where or when.

Except climbing out of an eleventh floor window in 1997 and deciding to climb back in.


The oddest thing, after the bands I slouched out of the venue to scribble notes in my car, and as I drove away, I wanted to kill myself even more.

Christmas comes early

Currently dying of loneliness in the evenings, no one's online, I know no one nearby in this town, anyone I do know ain't answering their phone. I need to get off the internet, but its all I've got. Anyone I know online is out drinking with their friends and making new friends.

...must dig myself out...

I was going to do NaNoWriMo this year, and my head and subconscious have been working overtime on ideas and weird stuff, pilots having nervous breakdowns, and crashing into things that aren't there, triggering a chain of events which makes all electricity stop working for an hour or so, but it turns out it was juts the mobile phone network in a small area, but people got scared. Some computer scientist tryingto figure out what it was the plane crashed into, a world reknowned scientist infact, the bloke who created the E programming language which is used in everything from mobile phones to kettles and air-conditioners, very good mates with Stan Lee apparently. Flatmate was starting a new band, lots of guitar distortion pedals, but in a basement flat there was a party going on which we gatecrashed. And all the time people are realising that they live in a post-apocolyptic world, they just took a while to readjust their understanding of what the apocalypse looked like, its everything you see on the news.

Christmas comes early as the postman delivers a CD from Russian Spy Camera, some American band who sound like Franz Ferdinand 2 should have sounded like, and also from Amazon, I have a 320Gb portable hard disc, should be useful for getting all the MP3s off of my old PC. Whilst the storeage capacity is huge, its only an order of magnitude and a half away from the golden 8Tb capacity that's required for the singularity.

I read somewhere that 8Tb is enough to record DVD quality footage for a year. If you can get a drive that that big and portable, you could hook it up to a portable digital camera and record your life for a year, you wouldn't have to remember anything. Any book you read, any note you write and song you here, everything for a year. With OCR software and that music recognition software and a bit of ingenuity, that's what the singularity is all about.

Alas, I'm still stuck in my bedroom wondering why folk I haven't seen in months and last time we met was really bad, aren't reciprocating, and I'm still lurking at the back of gigs for bands I don't care about, unable to talk to anyone else.

I think I'm basically dead.